Analysis and comment from Memphis, Tennessee, on media, politics, culture, science, my life and anything else that catches my eye.

Friday, November 03, 2006

Observation for the Day

Bob Corker's "Call Me" ad is provoking the strangest partisan reaction. Some folks refer to it as I just did. Most call it the "bimbo ad." Why? Because the "bimbo" is the most notable thing in it, the one that catches the attention and sticks in the memory.

But visit leftist/Democratic blogs and the ad is almost invariably referred to as the "racist bimbo ad." Why the extra modifier? Because the Democrats want you to believe their contention that the ad had some secret racist subtext.

They figure if they repeat it ad infinitum then it will be true. They figure if it's everywhere that history will record their version of events as "truth." They figure if they keep pounding the point home, folks will quit arguing with them and they win by default.

I posted this eighteen months ago but I figure it bears repeating at this late date. Hamlet as re-imagined for Harold:

To run, or not to run, that is the question:Whether 'tis nobler for the candidate to sufferThe slings and arrows of campaigningOr to take refuge against a sea of troubles in a safe House seat,And by ducking again avoid them? To run: to campaign;Once more; and by running to say we welcomeThe heartache and the thousand political barbsThat candidates are heir to, 'tis a falsehoodDevoutly to be put forward. To run, to campaign;To campaign: perchance to win: ay, there's the rub;For in that endless campaign what difficulties may come,When we have shuffled to yet another press conference,Must give us pause. There's the "gotcha"That makes calamity of political life.For who would bear the whips and scorns of Republicans,The grand jury's wrong, the proud uncle's contumely,The pangs of early polls, the national committee's delay,The insolence of voters, and the spurnsThat patient merit of unwashed crowds takes,When I myself might my legacy makeWith a safe House seat? Who would cable show hosts bear,To blather and sweat under a hot light,But that the dread of life as a private citizen,The anonymous country from whose shadowFew politicians return, puzzles the will,And makes me rather bear those perks I haveThan work for others I might not earn?Thus does indecision make wafflers of us all;And thus the native hue of Harold FordIs made even paler with this endless uncertainty;And campaigns of great and lofty platitudesWith this regard their volunteers turn awry.And lose the name of Senator.

I know, I'm not supposed to be blogging, but this story really got me. It's a sleazy effort to make FOX News look bad by selectively using numbers, or not using them.

The author frontloads the story with lots of hard numbers showing FOX's supposed decline; then he goes on:

But Fox's problems go deeper than that. If it was just the dearth of big stories this year, all the other cable networks would be down as well. Two were actually up in October.

CNN has also been down steeply this year in total viewers and 25-54s but not as much as Fox, and in October its 25-54 primetime audience was essentially flat at down 1 percent.

And both Headline News and MSNBC were actually up in that demo last month, by 18 percent and 19 percent.

Notice the comparison of year-to-year trends with last month numbers. Notice how, if the point of rebuttal is that 2005 was an anomalous year, he doesn't go back to 2004 to compare trends without the anomaly! (I tried to find the 2004 numbers, but without luck.) Also, notice the lack of hard numbers for the other networks.

Curious what those numbers might be? Try looking here or here. What you see is that FOX is still smoking the competition. Even with downward drifts, they still are far ahead.

Which is a point the author seems afraid you'll realise. Hence hiding the numbers. Pathetic.

And lastly, notice how the author states a political thesis:

As the network most identified with conservative America and in particular the Bush White House, Fox News is suffering the most from the disenchantment among conservatives over the war and the political scandals.

The news formula that worked for so long is now working against it, they say, as fewer of those disenchanted viewers bother to tune in to watch the news.

... and then quotes from three "independent" scholars who support it.

Another reporter taking the facts of a situation -- which ought to be bricks, immutable -- and using them isntead as clay to mould a thesis not entirely supported by those facts.

INSTANT UPDATE: Ah hah! Found some 2004 numbers here (scroll about halfway down), which undercut the author's thesis for certain.

CNBC averaged 139,000 in total day and 177,000 in primetime. Dennis Miller had 293,000, McEnroe had 66,000 viewers. This is the 14th night in a month where MacEnroe has averaged less than 100,000 viewers a night.

So, when we compare those numbers, we get this:

2004 2006FOX 915 1002CNN 412 501MSNBC 205 313CNBC 139 222

Hmmmm.... Viewer growth all around, and FOX is still beating the pants off CNN. (Though you can have "Fun With Numbers" by pointing out that CNN had 20% growth over the two year period vs. FOX's 10%. Wow! Double the growth!)

Aaron Klein has spent two years developing sources and contacts inside Palestinian terrorist organisations. He interviewed those leaders for their opinion of who should win the election is month. Overwhelmingly, they say, =Vote Democrat.

"Of course Americans should vote Democrat," Jihad Jaara, a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group and the infamous leader of the 2002 siege of Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, told WND.

"This is why American Muslims will support the Democrats, because there is an atmosphere in America that encourages those who want to withdraw from Iraq. It is time that the American people support those who want to take them out of this Iraqi mud," said Jaara, speaking to WND from exile in Ireland, where he was sent as part of an internationally brokered deal that ended the church siege.

Jaara was the chief in Bethlehem of the Brigades, the declared "military wing" of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party.

Together with the Islamic Jihad terror group, the Brigades has taken responsibility for every suicide bombing inside Israel the past two years, including an attack in Tel Aviv in April that killed American teenager Daniel Wultz and nine Israelis.

Muhammad Saadi, a senior leader of Islamic Jihad in the northern West Bank town of Jenin, said the Democrats' talk of withdrawal from Iraq makes him feel "proud."

"As Arabs and Muslims we feel proud of this talk," he told WND. "Very proud from the great successes of the Iraqi resistance. This success that brought the big superpower of the world to discuss a possible withdrawal."

Abu Abdullah, a leader of Hamas' military wing in the Gaza Strip, said the policy of withdrawal "proves the strategy of the resistance is the right strategy against the occupation."

"We warned the Americans that this will be their end in Iraq," said Abu Abdullah, considered one of the most important operational members of Hamas' Izzedine al-Qassam Martyrs Brigades, Hamas' declared "resistance" department. "They did not succeed in stealing Iraq's oil, at least not at a level that covers their huge expenses. They did not bring stability. Their agents in the [Iraqi] regime seem to have no chance to survive if the Americans withdraw."

Abu Ayman, an Islamic Jihad leader in Jenin, said he is "emboldened" by those in America who compare the war in Iraq to Vietnam.

"[The mujahedeen fighters] brought the Americans to speak for the first time seriously and sincerely that Iraq is becoming a new Vietnam and that they should fix a schedule for their withdrawal from Iraq," boasted Abu Ayman.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Video Sought

I'm trying to find the video of the Clinton/Ford event yesterday. Both WMC/5 and WREG/3 had the full videos up all day yesterday but seem to have already taken them down in favor of much briefer stories.

I know, I know, "bandwidth costs money." But still, taking it down the same day? Sheesh....

Anyway, I'm specifically looking for the segment where Harold the Lesser introduces and thanks some of his family.

Wednesday, November 01, 2006

What Harold Ford Jr. Really Meant

From Harold's own animated lips comes the truth: "He spent millions of dollars of his own money telling the truth about my record. That's wrong.... I approved this message because I won't let them make me into someone I already am."

Just watch it. Low-key and devastatingly funny.

Via John Harvey's Voting in Memphis blog, which also notes that Memphis is on track to have a 25% turnout in early voting. That's incredible, especially for a midterm election.

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

And We Want a Democratic Senate Why?

Harold Ford Jr, Congressman from Tennessee, and John Kerry, Senator from Massachusetts, have little in common but a party name. But putting Ford into the Senate will empower people like Kerry who say things like this:

If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they’re crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

John McCain, former POW, is already demanding a clear apology, to no avail. Of course Kerry, as a returned soldier from Vietnam said this to a Congressional committee:

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command....

They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

And so we must ask: Do we really want a Democratic Senate? Do we really want to give them power by giving the open Tennessee seat to Harold Ford Jr?

The sloppy description of Harold Ford Jr as "conservative" is, of course, just plain wrong. You might could make an argument for "conservative Democrat" but I think he's a disciple of Clinton's DLC, finding where most Tennesseans are and then moving himself into that position. Sometimes he does what his party tells him and sometimes -- like voting for the Bankruptcy Bill which will hurt his constituents -- who knows why he votes that way.

But he has voted in the past, and a lot of single-issue partisan groups have tracked and ranked his votes over the years. Via Free Republic comes an enlightening list:

1995-2004 On the votes that the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Assocation considered to be the most important in 1995-2004, Representative Ford voted their preferred position 82 percent of the time.